Town & Country hits the galleries for a sampling of this week's favorite art.

Adrian Ghenie

Adrian Ghenie

The 35-year-old Romanian artist creates large dramatic canvases that recall Francis Bacon's signature feat: they're simultaneously painterly and psychologically disturbing. Ghenie's twist: he undercuts the scary stuff—the ghosts of Hitler, the implication of brutality—with funny samplings of art history. Pollocky drips fit into a perfect birch forest, Hirst-like dots float over what could be a murder scene. This ruse is not entirely convincing. As you suspect the Eastern European knows, horror is horror even if you call it, as he does above, "Pie Fight Interior 8."

Mark Dion

Mark Dion

Dion revives the nineteenth-century mania for taxonomy and wunderkammer in a series of drawings, prints, and natural-history-style vitrines. The Belgian late bloomer Marcel Broodthaers invented this fondly mocking museological approach. But Broodthaers was a poet first and an indifferent visual artist: Dion, on the other hand, is an adept and chameleonic draughtsman with a show-stopping sense of design.